Sitting Down with AI

When our careers depend on us having to adapt to it, is it losing its fun?

I’ve been sitting with this thought for a while now, mostly because it affects me directly.

Companies are under pressure to do something with AI. I don’t think most of them fully know what that something is yet, but they feel like they have to move, whether because the board is asking, or the competitor announced something, or just because it feels irresponsible not to. Some of them genuinely believe it’ll help. Some are just following the herd. Most are a mix of both and they’re figuring it out as they go. Which is fine, honestly. That’s how a lot of things get adopted in tech. You move before you have the full picture and you course-correct later.

The problem is that UX designers are sitting right in the middle of all this uncertainty, and the job market is reflecting it in ways that feel pretty unfair.

Teams are getting leaner. When a company does open a design role, they want someone who is visibly comfortable with AI, or at minimum someone who says the right things about being open to it. Which means designers who aren’t performing that openness are getting filtered out, sometimes before anyone even looks at their portfolio. I know this because I’m job searching right now and I can feel it in how job descriptions are written, what gets asked in screening calls, what signals seem to matter.

So fine, you adapt. You learn the tools, you update how you talk about your work, you show that you’re not resistant. I’ve done this. Most designers I know have done this.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: what exactly are we adapting into?

Because if you actually sit down and think about what AI is good at in a design workflow today, it’s mostly the execution layer. Generating options quickly, writing copy variations, producing wireframe-ish things from a description. That part, sure. But the part of design work that actually determines whether a product is going in the right direction — understanding what problem you’re actually solving, reading the room in a stakeholder meeting, knowing when to push back and when to let something go — I don’t see how you get that from a prompt. You get that from being a person who has been in enough rooms to know how these things usually go.

That’s not me being defensive about the profession. I think AI genuinely changes some things. I just think the part it changes and the part that still requires a human are not being talked about honestly, mostly because honest conversation doesn’t sell courses.

Which brings me to the course thing.

There are so many of them now. AI for UX designers. How to future-proof your design career. Prompting for product people. And look, I’m not saying all of them are useless, but a lot of them are selling anxiety more than they’re selling skills. They don’t show you how AI is actually being used inside product teams at real companies, because most of those companies are still figuring that out themselves. So instead you get frameworks and workflows and terminology that sounds useful until you try to apply it somewhere and realize the context is completely missing.

They exist because that’s what’s making money right now. Anxiety about relevance is a very monetizable thing.

LinkedIn has turned into a performance of this anxiety. Every week there’s a new post about how designers who don’t adapt will be left behind, or a screenshot of something AI-generated with a caption about the future, or someone sharing their “AI-powered design process” that when you read it carefully is basically just using Figma with some new plugins. Everyone seems very eager to be on the right side of history. I get it, I’ve felt that pull too, but it also makes it hard to figure out what’s actually worth paying attention to.

For me, the practical reality is that I play along to some degree because I have to. I talk about AI in conversations. I stay current on what’s changing. I don’t position myself as resistant because resistant doesn’t get you interviews.

But underneath all of that, the question I haven’t been able to shake is whether we’re watching a real shift in what design work is, or whether we’re in a moment where everyone is performing transformation because the alternative is admitting that nobody really knows yet. And I genuinely don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone does.

Maybe that’s okay to say out loud.